New Genre for Boys: Blood-and-Guts Literature
There’s a great article today in the Wall Street Journal “Problem: Boys Don’t Like to Read. Solution: Books That Are Really Gross” and it is a fascinating look at how US publishers are responding to the decline in boys reading. Last year, US publishers released 261 new works of juvenile fiction aimed at boys, “more than twice the number put out in 2003 according to Bowker’s Books in Print database. There were 20 nonfiction entries for Boys, compared with just four in 2003. It is in part of the success of the Dangerous Book For Boys which came out last year, but it is a fantastic trend!
I wrote last July about Dana Gioia, who is the new Chairman of the National Endowment of the Arts, and his speech on how to get boys to read more. He noted that, “If you insist on giving boys books that every test on boys imagination they don’t like, guess what, they’re going to say ‘reading’s for girls. You got to in a sense give kids pleasure. Pleasure is a great guide. Pleasure brings you into things you wouldn’t go into otherwise. And when you make reading dutiful and boring and moralistic you’re going to lose people.”
Group Publishing has as one of it’s best selling elementary books a teenage title called Scary, Gross and Weird Stories from the Bible: Bloody Tent Pegs, Disembodied Fingers, and Suicidal Pigs…the Truths Buried in the Bizarre which is an incredible 13 week series designed precisely for boys!
![[boybooks_promoFinal]](http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/OB-BZ144_boyboo_20080804160041.jpg)
So what are some of the bestsellers for boys?
“Captain Underpants and the Attack of the Talking Toilets” (1999, 144 pgs, 37 million copies of the series in print)
“Oh, Yuck!: The Encyclopedia of Everything Nasty” (2000, 224 pages)
“Sir Fartsaot Hunts the Booger” (May 2008, 224 pages 55,000 in print, second printing) (I remember reading parts of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to my roommates in college that were full of items like this book’s hero’s unfortunate lower GI issue)
“Vlad The Impaler: The Real Count Dracula” (from the “Wicked History” series, Sept. 2007, 128 pages)
“It’s Disgusting and We Ate It: True Food Facts FromAround the World and Throughout History” (1998, 48 pages)
“Help! What’s Eating My Flesh? Runaway Staph and Strep Infections!” (2007, 64 pages, part of the “24/7 Science Behind the Scenes” series)
Could it be that boys are reading less, because they are having astronomical amounts of screen time instead?
Nah. It’s probably better to dumb down literature and not ask serious questions.
I feel it is a matter of taste. I would ask you how many sports biographies do girls read? Isn’t the idea to get kids to read in the first place? If we give them things they like to read, they might enjoy it and it could lead them to read other things.
I have to say that even though I have read quite a bit in my schooling, one of my favorite stories in the Bible is about Ehud, the left handed judge. It was even used as an example in one of my seminary classes. Why do I like it? Because I know others will not.
The topic of a book does not qualify or disqualify it as being good literature. The Phantom of the Opera and a romance novel both are love stories but they are not equal in literary quality. I have tried to get through A Tale of Two Cities many times but I have never made it. Now, you can say it is because I watch too much TV, which might be partially true but I know it has more to do with the topic of the book than my attention span.
Besides, would it do me more good to begrudgingly plod my way through A Tale of Two Cities that I do not enjoy, not read at all or read something else on a topic that I enjoy, like The Man in the Iron Mask or The Three Musketeers? I would venture to say that reading is better than not reading and enjoying what you are reading is better than hating it.